About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
That someone not only have decided that death is better, but also have gone through all the steps to act on it is a measure of their resolve, if anything. And as you’ve said, they’re still a rarity. On the spectrum of entertaining occasional thoughts to taking steps to actually doing it, the further you go, the less common it is!
That a lot of people have already gone this far, just how many more are mulling about it, questioning whether or not life is worth it, whether or not to do anything about it? And this “it gets better” mantra keeps some people from even speaking up! Why speak up when you’re just going to be slapped with a thought-terminating-cliché? It makes it harder to know how many people are miserable enough to entertain “bad thoughts”, and that the only objective measure we’d have is the number of people who’ve gone to the very end.
Honestly the number of people I’ve seen who are just living on the thought of “if I didn’t wake up tomorrow, that would be fine, except my mom might be sad”. And I mean seriously, not just the type of people who upvote posts of r/me_irl
Indeed. A quick check on the available studies on suicidal ideation (worldwide) led me to this study, which I can’t vouch for, but still gives me an indication that it’s not just our bubbles that’s led us to thinking it’s prevalent.
To quote its abstract:
Taking these figures at face value, around one out of five people worldwide have thoughts of suicide. Or by cobbling together estimates of world population aged under 25y/o and multiplying by 17% (harmonic mean of 14.3% and 22.6% to two sig figs), that’s roughly 550 million people. More than the US population, according to Wolfram Alpha.
Of course, that’s just very rough data, but still quite sobering if you ask me.
I’m just confirming here but prevalence implies that these statistics take into account size of the population measured? Like, suicide per capita has gone up?
If I am reading the abstract of the study I linked correctly, yeah. The percentage is of the population size (of youths–which I didn’t see a more stringent definition of).
The part I quoted also said, if I am understanding it correctly, that the year (hence, time) is only a factor in studies from the US. I guess you can say that it’s saying two different things. The “14.3% to 22.6” figure is for youth worldwide, but not accounted for time (hence, can’t say if it’s increasing or not). Then the studies from the US indicate that it’s rising (for the US).